Semiconductors face the ´80s: Seven leaders of the boomingest business in the U.S. prognosticate the problems supergrowth could lead to

Gordon Moore, president of Intel, put it succinctly: “By 1986, the semiconductor industry could be producing something of the order of 10¹⁴ functions per year. Who will use it all?” He, and 800 other participants in a recent colloquium in California´s Silicon Valley, organized by the Santa Clara Chapter of IEEE´s Electron Devices Society, heard some attempts at answers from industry leaders. But Dr. Moore was not satisfied. The rate of growth is such, he told Spectrum in a follow-up interview, that if the industry stays on its present upward curve of producing functions and tries to solve its problems as it always has in the past — by lowering prices — there will come a time in the 1980s when it could face disruption and a significant drop in revenues. “And that,” he says, “despite exciting new markets on the horizon, in an otherwise blossoming economy, could be a disaster.”